Taxi Rivals wasn’t meant to be a PC game but it could be!

The final prototype up for consideration is Taxi Rivals. This is quite unlike the others in the sense that the original design was never actually intended as a computer game.

I’ve increasingly taken an interest in board games and thought that it might be an interesting to try and design one of my own. My main issue with board games is that all too often they are incredibly complex to pick up. All too often we’re part way through a game before realising “ahh that is how the scoring works!”. What I really like is when you have mind games going on and this is the building blocks of Taxi Rivals. A paper prototype was made using a few objects lying around the place as markers and to be honest it was quite fun. There were a few issues though, namely how to bid. Ideally I’d have used small whiteboards but instead opted to split a deck of cards so that you’d put down 2 & 4 to get 24. The other was that I only had 6 sided dice so the random selection of the points was limited to a 6×6 grid. Whilst this was padded out via roads, really it wanted to be larger.

To help communicate the idea I developed a computer game version, which helped solve the problems found in the paper prototype. I still feel the “game board” needs to be larger though. The prototype itself also has the drawback of showing the text when you input it but on an online version this wouldn’t be an issue and locally I’d use a password style field (although players will need to disguise the keys they press).

If I was to further develop the game I would look at developing both local & online multiplayer as well as improving the size of the gameboard, possibly with more padding, to ensure that players have plenty distance between them. In order to get greater winnings the game needs to push up the average distance travelled. Naturally of course visuals would get an overhaul, especially the player icons. They really should be taxis!

The hardest part of course will be learning how to implement networking into a GameMaker project, something that I’ve not tried before but that’s a more techy minded thing for another day.